2023-03-11: Currently reading: France: A History from Gaul to De Gaulle by John Julius Norwich 📚
2023-03-11: Finished reading: Making Judaism Safe for America by Jessica Cooperman 📚
2023-03-11: Finished reading: The Hag: The Life, Time, and Music of Merle Haggard by Marc Eliot 📚
2023-03-11: Finished reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 📚
2023-03-11: Finished reading: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
2023-03-11: Finished reading: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze 📚
2023-02-21: New status board for my office door.
2023-01-10: I am a man more scheduled against than scheduling.
2023-01-06: Currently reading: Starstruck in the Promised Land: How the Arts Shaped American Passions about …
2022-12-24: Mittens.
2022-12-24: In the three days before Christmas, I have been asked to review a tenure case, serve as an advisor …
2022-12-22: Looking forward to reading this one.
2022-12-22: Currently reading: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 📚
2022-12-20: Finished reading: Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton 📚
2022-12-13: Over the next few days I’ll share some of the more interesting parts of America’s Public …
2022-12-13: I published a free, open-access book today. Called America’s Public Bible: A Commentary it …
2022-12-04: Currently reading: Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis by John …
2022-11-30: TIL that LaTeX and I were both released in the same year. A coincidence? I trow not.
2022-11-29: I was not at all sure whether I had done a good job teaching this new course this semester. But the …
2022-11-24: Our one requirement for guests at Thanksgiving, or other gatherings at our house: phones must be …
2022-11-20: A calendrical sea change A significant change—not much remarked on, from what I can tell—is the sea change in how Protestant …
2022-11-19: Thanks, @ayjay and @jaheppler, for checking out Mastodon for the rest of us and saving us some time. …
2022-11-18: Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
2022-11-14: Currently reading: The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity by Eric L. Goldstein 📚
2022-11-13: Currently reading: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
2022-11-05: I like that each issue of the American Council of Learned Societies newsletter ends with a poem.
2022-11-01: Currently reading: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin 📚
2022-10-22: Beating the bounds of the elementary school We recently moved to a new house. My children’s elementary school has a tradition they call the …
2022-10-20: Cover for my digital book, to be published December 13. Posting this for you all on Micro.blog …
2022-10-13: Honest acknowledgements My children contributed nothing to this project, and if it were not for them, I would certainly …
2022-10-10: 6 y.o. playing white; 11 y.o. playing black. The 6y.o. was sure he was done for, but I told him to …
2022-10-10: This is a great pattern for a notebook. Ruled by default, but grid if you need it.
2022-10-07: Finished reading: Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion’s Presence of the Past by …
2022-09-28: Currently reading: Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read …
2022-09-24: Currently reading: Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling by Eric …
2022-09-21: My colleagues have been creating software to transcribe structured historical data, which we call …
2022-09-21: The Green Tunnel podcast has released the trailer for season two on the history of the Appalachian …
2022-09-16: Finished reading: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn 📚
2022-09-15: Podcast on the history of American antisemitism R2 Studios at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has received a grant from the Luce …
2022-09-15: R2 Studios has a new website making it easier to find and subscribe to our historical, narrative …
2022-09-15: Here is my colleague John Turner, writing about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints …
2022-09-10: Currently reading: Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized …
2022-09-09: Finished reading: Good Booty by Ann Powers 📚
2022-09-09: Finished reading: Country Music by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns 📚
2022-09-08: Essays interpreting pandemic collections Over the past couple years RRCHNM has partnered with many Jewish cultural heritage institutions to …
2022-09-02: Four guides to teaching religion and U.S. history with Library of Congress sources, from my …
2022-08-27: My friend and collaborator Kellen Funk and I are working on a set of research questions—mostly …
2022-08-27: One of the best parts of my job is being the coordinator for graduate students at the Roy Rosenzweig …
2022-08-26: Most used languages
2022-08-20: Red Sox at Orioles. If you had told me when I booked these tickets months ago that the Orioles would …
2022-08-20: On the ramparts of Fort McHenry.
2022-08-12: The other new office view.
2022-08-08: Currently reading: The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music by Michael …
2022-07-29: This is not the ASCH you are looking for.
2022-07-28: We recently moved to a new house. I believe I will be able to make this working arrangement work.
2022-07-25: Currently reading: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins …
2022-07-15: Here is an amazing eighteenth-century devotional and illuminated manuscript that the Winterthur …
2022-07-15: A fun kids’ playground next to a municipal airport, where the kids can watch light planes take off …
2022-07-08: JBJ struck out one and got out of the inning allowing only one run. Which is better than every Red …
2022-07-08: Jackie Bradley Jr. is one of my favorite Red Sox players. Watching JBJ, a position player, pitch …
2022-07-08: My colleague and I submitted two grants today. Pretty wiped out.
2022-07-02: Currently reading: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen 📚
2022-06-29: Writing grants all this week. It occurs to me that as a historian I am a non-fiction writer, but …
2022-06-26: Currently reading: Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers by Charles McCrary 📚
2022-06-15: In our most recent Religion @ RRCHNM newsletter, we feature Jannelle Legg’s …
2022-06-02: Pleasant walk beside the canal in Indianapolis.
2022-06-02: I wish there were a way to write a 1,500 word essay without first writing a 3,500 word essay and …
2022-06-02: I’m looking forward to attending the biennial conference hosted by Center for the Study of …
2022-06-01: Currently reading: Washington Gladden’s Church: The Minister Who Made Modern American …
2022-05-30: Currently reading: Radicalized by Cory Doctorow 📚
2022-05-30: My children love ribs more than anything, so I did the best I could with my humble kettle grill and …
2022-05-23: Congratulations to Kris Stinson, who has published his first article, “American Babel: History …
2022-05-18: Currently reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 📚
2022-05-18: Currently reading: A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural …
2022-05-18: It’s important to me that I have a place to put my “outtakes and scraps” when …
2022-05-18: After threatening to upend my digital life with their changes to GSuite, Google has backed down. My …
2022-05-16: Most recent issue of our “American Religion @ RRCHNM” newsletter. Features a well-done …
2022-05-14: Okay, Micro.blog friends. What examples of popular musicians who made their best (or at least, very …
2022-05-14: What do you call a book “manuscript,” but for a book-length interactive scholarly work? Whatever you …
2022-05-11: Here is an excerpt from the development version of America’s Public Bible, showing how books …
2022-05-11: Working on final copyedits and proofreading for a project. One never finishes a project; one simply …
2022-05-03: Small family dinner to celebrate Abby signing on the dotted line to become assistant professor of …
2022-05-03: Currently reading: Cash: by the editors of Rolling Stone 📚
2022-05-03: The Fall.
2022-05-03: Caroline Greer writes about what you can learn about the first community of Shakers in the U.S. from …
2022-04-29: The progress bar is not strictly necessary, but it does make one feel better.
2022-04-29: Thanks to my colleague, John Turner, a group of us from GMU got to take a tour of the Latter-day …
2022-04-29: Currently reading: A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears by Antonino …
2022-04-28: Currently reading: I Shot a Man in Reno: A History of Death by Murder, Suicide, Fire, Flood, Drugs, …
2022-04-28: What to do after Google Apps for Your Domain? Friends, I have been caught by the end of Google Apps for Your Domain, or whatever that program is …
2022-04-25: Pleased to learn that the Commonwealth of Virginia appears to have upgraded me from a Human Resource …
2022-04-22: Nice enough to work outside again.
2022-04-21: I have been a member of the American Society of Church History since graduate school, and every time …
2022-04-15: 📧 New issue of the “American Religion @ RRCHNM” newsletter, featuring our most recent …
2022-04-14: My collaborators at RRCHNM (@chnm) recently started a newsletter: “American Religion @ …
2022-04-11: So far today I have gotten 26 spam phone calls, which is not typical. What is going on?
2022-04-08: The German Historical Institute and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are offering …
2022-04-08: This is definitely inside baseball, but here is a description of how @chnm runs our data-heavy …
2022-02-07: The 10 y.o.’s favorite song might be “Blue Suede Shoes.” She is intensely loyal to Carl Perkins and …
2022-02-07: Currently reading: Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick 📚
2022-01-31: Pleased beyond measure to have contributed to this documentary collection in honor of Jonathan Sarna …
2022-01-31: Good mail day.
2022-01-23: Currently reading: Citizen Cash by Michael Stewart Foley 📚
2022-01-07: This Friday afternoon, two reader reports recommending publication for the large-ish digital …
2022-01-04: I rewrote a complicated Go program this afternoon, stripping out a major component, deleting 100 …
2022-01-04: Everybody complains about reviewer number two but sometimes reviewer number two has to install the …
2021-12-31: Playing 80 Days as a New Year’s Eve family game. 🎮
2021-12-29: Working some more on the text adventure game with the 10 y.o. Despite my explicit instructions that …
2021-12-28: My daughter and I have been writing a text adventure game for the ten-year-old set over the break. …
2021-12-19: Currently reading: A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman 📚
2021-12-14: Got a nice email from a fifth grader telling me that her class is using my map of slavery and that …
2021-12-11: Finished reading: The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America by …
2021-12-11: I love the idea of character-based playlists for the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. Here’s one …
2021-12-10: Currently reading: The Resurrection of Johnny Cash by Graeme Thomson 📚
2021-10-08: Someone recently complained on GitHub, “You haven’t updated this package in three …
2021-09-26: I had no idea you could get a document camera for anything …
2021-09-26: Currently reading: History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi 📚
2021-09-15: No one cares about reproducible research (including me) until they need to run some research scripts …
2021-09-04: Parts of the DOI/CrossRef system are amazing. The XML responses in email … less so.
2021-09-02: I finished a longer (12K words) piece of writing yesterday and a shorter (2K words) one today. A …
2021-08-30: RRCHNM has cleaned up its back catalog of video on YouTube. There’s a lot of good history …
2021-08-29: ✉️ Working on It #11: The Stack.
2021-08-24: Ted Gioia designs and builds his home library.
2021-08-22: Earlier this year I got myself a proper stereo. My family had stereo equipment like this when I was …
2021-08-22: The kindergartner, the fifth grader, and the two professors are all packed up for the start of …
2021-08-20: A grandfather clock my daughter made out of legos.
2021-08-12: I’m very pleased with the Obsidian iOS app, which lets me get away from iCloud syncing and …
2021-08-07: Currently reading: Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith (Spiritual Lives) by Elesha J. Coffman 📚
2021-08-05: Delighted to see my friend Sam Lebovic’s new book available for pre-order: A Righteous …
2021-08-04: I left one meeting today by saying I had to go to my next appointment. My next appointment was …
2021-07-02: Right now I’m writing a crawler that discovers all the digitized text-based sources in the …
2021-07-02: This summer and fall I’m working with the amazing and fun folks at LC Labs on a project called …
2021-07-02: I’ve said it elsewhere, but probably not here on Micro.blog: I’m very glad that Jason …
2021-05-13: Currently reading: The Human Factor by Graham Greene 📚
2021-04-01: Currently reading: The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.📚
2021-03-30: Currently reading: To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party by Heather Cox Richardson. 📚
2021-03-29: Not as exciting as the title would indicate. And definitely not exciting once you log in.
2021-03-28: Current status: Johnny Cash, “The Beast in Me.”
2021-03-21: Currently reading: Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of …
2021-02-24: … until it doesn’t.
2021-02-24: It works …
2021-01-25: In 2017, I changed the topic of my digital methods class to Reconstruction. Twenty days before that …
2021-01-23: My internal monologue upon assigning the Gospel of Mark: “Hmm. Should I scan this reading for …
2021-01-23: I’m teaching The Global History of Christianity this semester. It is far and away my favorite …
2020-12-23: The most recent issue of my newsletter points you to two songs about death and breath. Johnny Cash …
2020-12-09: I put a photos widget on my phone, and everyday it turns up a half dozen picture like this one.
2020-12-07: My daughter made a genuine game, with a start screen and levels, all in Google Slides. You move a …
2020-12-06: 📰 Newsletter: Presbyterians—tabulated, visualized, and interpreted.
2020-12-02: Currently reading: Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz. 📚
2020-11-03: A bitter cup.
2020-11-03: Today’s task: remembering what in the world I was doing the last time I touched this project.
2020-09-06: Currently reading: Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. 📚
2020-09-06: Consider the lilies of the field.
2020-08-28: 9 y.o.: “Daddy, can I ask you a question.” Me: “Yes.” 9 y.o.: “Does anyone actually read …
2020-08-28: “Everybody’s Bible Box”
2020-08-24: “To cast a free ballot ・A root of democracy”
2020-08-21: The 4 y.o. wrote this letter (without help!) to his grandparents, who could not come visit this …
2020-08-20: Currently reading: Religion and Profit: Moravians In Early America by Kate Carté. 📚
2020-08-20: Well, that’s one take on the Oxford Movement.
2020-08-20: I’m not 100% sure what it means to say “Democracy is the law of nature pervading the law of …
2020-08-19: Is it possible to be a low-level academic administrator without it killing your prose style? Asking …
2020-08-16: In the most recent issue of Working on It, I talk through how I revised a visualization to be as …
2020-08-15: This historian has been cited in an article titled “Dynamic courtship signals and mate …
2020-08-09: My daughter: “I’ve never understood why there is so much shouting at camps.” Emphasis on my …
2020-08-06: I can tell I’m a low-level chump because I try to write meaningful email subject lines. If you are …
2020-08-06: More appendices please Currently reading: The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power Of Evangelical Women Celebrities …
2020-08-06: I’ve had my own domain for fifteen years, but it only just now occurred to me: I should manage my …
2020-08-06: Currently reading: [Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless …
2020-07-10: The most bizarre pattern of spam emails that I get are Verizon Fios ads a couple times a week, …
2020-07-01: I assume that by forcing people to use Outlook and only Outlook as the client for email, my …
2020-06-26: It is a pleasure to write code in Go, because it really does hit that sweet spot of letting you be …
2020-06-24: As I contemplate five consecutive hours of Zoom meetings this afternoon, my soul dies a little, and …
2020-06-23: Editing audio for the first time, and the waveform below is what “uh and uh” looks like.
2020-06-22: The American Religious Ecologies project has released this interactive map of Roman Catholic …
2020-06-22: I’ve been making outlines of Lego figures for my son to color and cut out. We’ve made …
2020-06-20: No fig tree, but at least I can sit in peace under my own vines.
2020-06-19: What did the United States look like in 1860, only a half decade before Juneteenth? The enslavement …
2020-06-18: I’ve written a lot of talks. But this talk that I have to give soon is going to be a video …
2020-06-18: My wife saw me reading this book, and asked if she could read it when I was done. I told her I had …
2020-06-16: August 2014 and June 2020: the two moments where I had more bookshelf space than books.
2020-04-13: It is an awkward for someone with my first name to trust the governor of Virginia much more than the …
2020-03-30: WFH.
2020-03-30: The calculus of how best to game my caffeine consumption so as to be wired for an evening class and …
2020-03-27: One of my daughter’s homeschool assignments today was to identify the seven words from the cross in …
2020-03-23: Ready for class tonight.
2020-03-17: From one of the psalms appointed for morning prayer today: My companions and neighbors you have put …
2020-03-10: Reading the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies schedules I’ve written a few blog posts over at the American Religious Ecologies blog, discussing the …
2020-03-09: My daughter got excited by her school spelling bee, so she and my wife have been making a podcast …
2020-03-05: Very disappointed that no one seems to have caught the reference implied by the “Conjoined Triangles …
2020-02-29: Two rules of thumb for making plots of change over time. It is usually more illuminating to plot …
2020-01-14: I believe it was Kohelet who said, “Of commenting on other people’s work, there is no end.”
2020-01-10: Helped my colleague and friend with his author website. The key to a good author website? Having …
2019-12-21: The Irishman = Casino + Forrest Gump + The Shootist
2019-12-18: End of the semester: time to put up the sign my daughter made for me.
2019-11-30: Hello, Micro.blog. I’m starting to write a newsletter, and the first issue is titled “Love letter to …
2019-11-06: Considering that I was a child in the nineties, you would think I would know something about …
2019-11-02: They Knew They Were Pilgrims My colleague John Turner’s book, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest …
2019-11-02: I discounted everyone’s complaints about bugginess in recent Apple software. But in the past …
2019-10-31: We recently released the website for RRCHNM’s American Religious Ecologies project. You can …
2019-10-31: When I decided to share my desktop’s screen to my laptop, I didn’t quite anticipate that …
2019-10-23: It’s a weird thing to type, to be sure.
2019-10-09: Congratulations to the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond for receiving the …
2019-09-30: The 8 y.o., who has just started chess club, is poised to win her first game since she is up a queen …
2019-09-28: If you are trying to upgrade your LaTeX installation on a Saturday morning just so you can send in …
2019-09-20: Writing my abstract today for this symposium on “Religion in Place: Spaces | Borders | Bodies” which …
2019-09-12: To be fair, history is hard.
2019-09-02: In honor of Labor Day, I give you these two images.
2019-09-01: Grilling by headlamp.
2019-08-31: Is it just me, or is it super weird that the Museum of the Bible would make a video about my …
2019-08-31: Team teaching Here’s a thought that occurred to me this week. I’ve read hundreds of scholarly books …
2019-08-31: It was a whirlwind first week of the semester. For two days I think I did literally nothing but talk …
2019-08-23: Here’s the syllabus (PDF) for American Scriptures, a class I teaching for the second time and …
2019-08-23: RRCHNM has published the second issue of Current Research in Digital History, a journal that …
2019-08-23: This is the week where I write to a dozen people asking when their work will be done, and a dozen …
2019-08-19: Syllabus for a class I’m teaching this fall.
2019-08-19: Length of time I used communication technology before being utterly exhausted with it: email: 15 …
2019-08-08: Any of you IndieWeb folk have a non-creepy alternative to Google Analytics?
2019-08-08: What’s the name for this law of the internet? All publishing venues sooner or later dispense …
2019-08-06: My two favorite peer review comments of all time are (1) that I am a “Catholic triumphalist” (if …
2019-07-30: Well, there’s your problem right there.
2019-07-29: Nothing makes me feel better as a teacher than to see a bunch of students who took a course with me …
2019-07-23: If you are a sysadmin interested in working in the DC-area, and if you value a free and open web …
2019-07-23: But if you think that lighthouse poem is cute, here is one she wrote for one of her stories. 😵
2019-07-23: A poem my daughter wrote as a birthday present for her grandmother.
2019-07-23: Starting to think in a serious way about classes for the fall. Here’s what’s on deck: …
2019-07-23: It is comforting to know that if I ever run out of ideas, I can redo my old work and call it “live …
2019-07-22: A fair number of people who aren’t my students or colleagues ask me for advice about digital …
2019-07-21: Now that the Red Sox are losing to the Orioles we can officially call this a bad season.
2019-07-19: Congratulations to GMU’s Jeri Wieringa, who completed her PhD today with her dissertation “A …
2019-07-18: Anyone who thinks the internet is an immaterial abstraction has never had to work on the internet in …
2019-07-03: In a turnabout of events, the 7 y.o. says we can’t go out to lunch yet because she is the one …
2019-07-02: Two hours to write the script in Go, which then takes two hours to run. Could have written the …
2019-07-01: Does anyone else mistakenly type terminal commands in iMessage threads to their loved ones?
2019-06-30: Have to agree with the Washington Post that the Museum of the Bible’s “sound shell” is pretty cool.
2019-06-28: Susan Schulten explains how maps were made during the Paris Peace process in the aftermath of WWI.
2019-06-13: My colleagues and I are working on digitizing the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. Or—I should …
2019-06-12: The most productive I’ve been as a writer was while writing dissertation and also watching my …
2019-05-21: What are you citizens of the free republic of Micro.blog using for an RSS reader these days? …
2019-05-20: Here is what some colleagues at RRCHNM and I will be working on next.
2019-05-20: It’s amusing to read all these articles about how you have to minify your markup and transpile your …
2019-05-20: The 3y.o. is pedantic about grammar and word choice and not shy about correcting anyone, but then, …
2019-05-16: Why is it that every humanities use of maps begins with a disclaimer that maps can tell lies? Is it …
2019-05-16: Called Hover. They picked up right away, and in two minutes I had the answer to my problem and it …
2019-05-15: In a twist on the usual “write my own blog engine before I write a blog post” story, …
2019-05-14: I really like the Spotify playlists for the characters on Halt and Catch Fire, like this one for …
2019-05-13: For unfathomable reasons, when you submit final grades they are listed as A, A+, A-, because you …
2019-05-13: For the past few years, colleagues at RRCHNM and I have been making maps of election returns to the …
2019-05-11: The 7 y.o. was amazed I had (and would wear) a shirt that is older than her.
2019-05-09: Software I used to love but now loathe: Jekyll Slack Software likely to head in that direction: …
2019-05-09: If you get the data model right, all the rest of the programming is so much easier. Get it wrong, …
2019-05-07: Making a Doodle poll. Q: What have I become? A: A middle manager.
2019-05-06: It’s my eleventh wedding anniversary and the last day of classes. Also, got tenured today.
2019-05-04: If you are on an Indie web platform like Micro.blog, then by definition you will be interested in …
2019-04-27: Church in the Wild Delighted to see Brett Grainger’s Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America in print. …
2019-04-27: There is a bug in Ruby (only on the Mac) that puts “the first shall be last and the last shall …
2019-04-23: NYU Press has added an open-access section called Open Square. I’m glad to see more academic …
2019-04-21: Illustrations for the Paschal Triduum From Maundy Thursday: From Good Friday: For Easter Sunday:
2019-04-19: I read @ayjay’s newsletter, then I read The Typewriter Revolution, and now I am looking for a green …
2019-04-18: A tribute to my departed colleague Marion Deshmukh (1945–2019), who was a professor in my department …
2019-04-17: The chart on “quality of question” vs “strength of evidence” in Roger Peng’s blog post about the …
2019-04-17: We are all tacitly agreeing not to ask one another to do anything new between now and the end of the …
2019-04-17: For a few months I’ve listened almost entirely to music and not podcasts. I am returning to …
2019-04-12: Current status.
2019-04-10: My rules for giving talks. Make the audience—not yourself—look smart. Entertain, then educate. End …
2019-04-02: A gift from my emeritus colleague at lunch yesterday.
2019-03-28: My phone number is still from my home town, where I haven’t lived since 2006 and where I don’t know …
2019-03-27: I played chess with the 7 y.o. yesterday. After she captured both my bishops, she said, “No more …
2019-03-24: Almost all airports make Dulles look bad, but the Indianapolis airport in particular makes Dulles …
2019-03-13: At the Metro on a laptop tethered to a cell phone, SSHing into the workstation into my office, then …
2019-03-13: How many monitors does a person need? Answer: Just one more.
2019-03-11: Looking forward to having ten historians representing eight projects come this Friday to …
2019-03-02: How a team of researchers is “Detecting Footnotes in 32 million pages of ECCO.” That’s published in …
2019-03-02: The workshop on quantitative history that Chad Gaffield and Ian Milligan hosted this past week at …
2019-02-27: There are lies, damn lies, and text messages from United saying they “value your time.”
2019-02-23: Amazon is serving me ads that say “Make this your holiest Lent." So I guess targeted …
2019-02-16: My colleague Mills Kelly on his work tracing the history of the Appalachian Trail, starting here in …
2019-02-16: Now that my department’s two job searches are over I feel like I can get this semester and my …
2019-02-09: Some of my colleagues are deeply gifted at commenting on draft work, and I always feel inadequate to …
2019-02-09: Gimlet Media didn’t make podcasting, but they certainly helped popularize it. Now with their …
2019-02-02: Emma Green reviewing Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: Fifty-five years after the passage of …
2019-01-26: Both Happy Feet and Smallfoot have the same religious plot elements—plot elements that could have …
2019-01-24: Nashville Union and American, 11 May 1875.
2019-01-24: Went looking for the PDF of my book which had gone missing. It was in the directory “Desktop > …
2019-01-23: Had my customary start of the semester spat with the copy machine. If copiers were the dominant …
2019-01-22: Syllabus for “Computational History.”
2019-01-18: Semi-annual shoutout to Caleb McDaniel’s Generic Syllabus Maker.
2019-01-18: Draft syllabus for Global History of Christianity.
2019-01-17: Incredible that a five hundred page reader in the history of Christianity can contain exactly two …
2019-01-17: Robin Jensen’s new history of The Cross is an addition to my syllabus this semester. It’s my attempt …
2019-01-14: People, let me plead with you: your academic event does not need to be longer than one day. Unless …
2019-01-14: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” should have been my auto-reply when trying to schedule …
2019-01-11: Grant submitted. That makes three this academic year so far.
2019-01-11: I’ve only been using Notion for about a week, but my cautious, reserved opinion is that it is …
2019-01-10: At ASCH in Chicago, I was on a panel with Shirley Mullen, whom I had never met. After a few minutes …
2019-01-10: True, fixing up my blog page was definitely not the most important thing I had to do today. But …
2019-01-09: Just as numismatics is a well-defined field, in future millennia archeologists will be able to date …
2019-01-09: This is hard to explain, but I had a keyboard/monitor plugged into a computer running Ubuntu, and …
2019-01-09: By deleting Slack.
2019-01-09: Fifty-six proposals for our workshops and special issue with the Journal of Social History. …
2019-01-08: Current status: recreational finding of studs.
2019-01-05: “My next two book projects” is the new “my next book project.”
2019-01-04: Happy belated birthday, Philip Schaff, born January 1, 1819, and founder of the American Society of …
2019-01-03: If you are at the AHA, check out this panel on “Lessons Learned from Three Digital Dissertations in …
2019-01-02: Tim Larsen’s religious biography of J. S. Mill for the Spiritual Lives series he edits at …
2019-01-02: Pro tip for collaboration: Don’t update the axis legends on your visualizations from variable …
2019-01-02: American religious history is everywhere. But sometimes it shows up in the public library parking …
2018-12-31: Helping family with their computers that do not have ad blockers installed has reacquainted me with …
2018-12-28: A collect for the Holy Innocents. We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of …
2018-12-21: Current status
2018-12-21: Converts and perverts What is the reciprocal term for a religious convert? You could use prepositions, as we do now, to …
2018-12-20: Thanks, American Academy of Religion. Framing this is not something I would have ever done for …
2018-12-19: Chad Gaffield and Ian Milligan are hosting a workshop on “Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn …
2018-12-19: My preference for having one obvious, correct way to do things without fuss and working in …
2018-12-18: There are about 230,000 of these schedules from the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies in the National …
2018-12-18: I learned the word stanine today. Who says standardized testing isn’t educational?
2018-12-18: The most surprising thing about being an academic has been how much of the job is evaluating other …
2018-12-18: I am unduly excited to be teaching “The Global History of Christianity” again next …
2018-12-17: It seems likely that nothing I will ever create will get more readers or users than this map of …
2018-12-17: The “Yes, Yes, No" segment in Episode #131 of Reply All is a brilliant example of close …
2018-12-15: I guess there was twice as much Christianity in the twentieth century.
2018-12-15: End of the semester status.
2018-12-15: Waiting for DNS to propagate, so the internet is already more fun.
2018-12-15: Trying to make the internet fun again. Going to give micro.blog a try, mostly because people whose …